Installation difficulties with SONAR Platinum

OK. I had SONAR Professional running perfectly on my Win 10 Home PC.  Then I decided to upgrade for lifetime updates and move to Platinum.  BIG MISTAKE!!
 
For some reason I am not able to fathom, I cannot get Platinum to run.  I asked Support, and they suggested the following linl:

 
Somehow, this did not help - as in my case SONAR Platinum did actually fire up - but then as soon as you either attempt to open one of the templates presented on the opening screen, OR attempted to open an existing project, SONAR would freeze, and then after some period of time the Windows Blue Screen would come up - and the reported error is 'DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION' is displayed.
 
So then I did a complete NEW fresh install of Win 10 Home.  I completed this successfully, installed some of the other apps that I normally use (Lightroom, OFFICE 365), and then proceeded to complete the Command Center and other installs - all NEW, FRESH.
 
After completion, I rebooted my PC and then attempted to fire up Platinum, and much to my disappointment, ended with exactly the same error I had before!!  I am at my wits end!
 
If anyone can help, as SUPPORT does not seem to be very helpful, I truly would appreciate that.
 
DELL XPS; INTEL Core i7; 9 GB RAM; x64 processor; CPU 920 @ 2.67 GHz
Windows 10 Home
 
Thanks!

Chuck, just listening to your Elements of Love - very nice!
 

If your Dell laptop was issued with Windows 7 you might want to just stay with that. 
My wifes Lenovo laptop ( was W764)  is crippled since her tech at work upgraded it with a new SSD and installed W10. Windows 10 seems to try and use generic drivers for everything and Windows update is useless for finding the right drivers. And with Laptops some drivers are very specific and only written once for that model and that OS. So her video driver sucks, the screen resolution is wrong and no way to adjust it.. there's no camera or SD card reader either as Lenovo only supplies drivers for W7. 
She wants me to put W7 back in it. 

You might try having BlueScreenView scan your Windows dump file and look at its report.  This is a freeware Windows dump analysis tool that could help you figure out what is going on:
 
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html
 
Bob Bone
 

Cactus Music
Yes but with her laptop W10 would not accept the W7 drivers, It would  tell me I already had the correct driver and refuse to install or just tell me it could not proceed. 

You probably already know this, but there are various ways to override driver installation depending on which version of Win 10 is installed. If I have misunderstood the problem just ignore me:)
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/take-back-control-driver-updates-windows-10/
 

Cactus Music
It's no problem finding the correct W7 drivers you shouldn't have to make screen shots. Just go to the manufactures web site and all the drivers will be listed. 

The printout is just for quick and easy reference AFTER installing win 10, when devices may show up as generic rather than with their specific make\model.
 

Cactus Music
 In the case of Lenovo there are no drivers for anything but Windows 7 in the drop down for OS. 

 
That's when I use my printout to check the name/model of the particular component that I am looking for a driver for and go to its manufacturers website (nvidea, Intel etc) rather than the laptop manufacturers website. I dont know about Lenovo, but certainly every laptop I have ever worked on uses third party components whose driver download pages are almost always more up to date than the computer manufacturers.
 

Cactus Music
And I just ran into this with the rebuild of a friends Acer Windows 8.0 laptop. There were drivers for W7 and W 8.0 but nothing for W8.1 or W 10.    I have a W8.1 disk but was forced to install W7 ( no issue with this )  because you cannot easily find W8.0  anywhere. W 8.0 product key won't work with W 8.1.   He had never bothered to make the back up disks and his hard drive bonked out. 

Oh the joys of windows registration Johnny:) I never did understand the convoluted free upgrade path restrictions.
 

Chuck, Bristol_Jonesy, Bob Bone
Thanks for your suggestions earlier in this thread.  So, this is where I stand now:
I have the Profire 610 USB interface from MAudio as my sound card.  Yes, this remains on and connected during each start-up.
I downloaded Driver Toolkit and updated all the relevant drivers, incl the ASMedia driver I referred to above.
Completely uninstalled SONAR and all its elements incl the Command Center.
Updated drivers and went through a number of PC restarts for this.
CLEAN install of SPLAT through the Command Center (which I installed afresh).
Same problem on starting up SPLAT.  This time, I am able to view the minidump file using BlueScreen utility.
This is what this tells me at the last BSOD event this morning:
Caused by driver ntoskrnl.exe.  This is a system driver 'NT Kernel System' in Windows.
 
What next?  Is this something that can be addressed without having to reinstall Windows?  I am almost at my wits end, and Cakewalk support has been taking their time responding to my support call-out last week.
 
Thanks to all of you for your continued support!
Ananth

monusharun
Completely uninstalled SONAR and all its elements incl the Command Center.

did you follow the "clean install guide" when doing this?
https://www.cakewalk.com/Support/Knowledge-Base/2007013372/Clean-Install-All-Cakewalk-Software
if not, some leftovers could've remained in the registry
good luck!

Here is an image from BlueScreenView:
 
 

I am about to watch the Chicago Cubs hopefully even up the baseball World Series, but I did do a quick forum search on that failing module you reported from the output from running the BlueScreenView utility.
 
Open a new tab and copy/paste in the following parameters to get the 19 results I got - maybe there is something in one of them - I will look back at them in an inning change:
 
site:forum.cakewalk.com ntoskrnl.exe
 
The above search will limit Google to searching in the Cakewalk forums, for the ntoskrnl.exe component, and that basic format for searching the forums really helps cut down the results to what you want - just searching the forums.
 
Bob Bone
 

Hi Bob, so how did the Cubs do?  Sorry, not much of a baseball guy myself!
I followed your suggestions and downloaded this thing called TweakBit PCRepair Kit and had it scan my system. Sure enough there were >100 issues related to the system, incl the ntoskrnl.exe thing.  So I did a 'Repair All Issues' which went through fine.  A rescan showed up no issues, so I thought I was good to go.
Restarted PC and then attempted to fire up Sonar Platinum.  Same problem - BSOD, but in the BlueScreenView report I noticed an additional error - hal.dll error along with the ntoskrnl.exe error.
I then used the device manager and disable  the Firewire card as you suggested.
Restarted, fired up Sonar, BSOD again - this time only the ntoskrnl.exe error.
Hence not sure the issue was with the firewire.
 
What really bothers me is this is ONLY happening with SONAR!  Before this I had SONAR Professional running just fine, no crashes, nothing - and I used to launch this through the Command Center.
 
All these problems started up when I upgraded to Platinum!  Woe is me!  Sometime ago I attempted to re-install Professional, and that too now does not work!!!
 
Cakewalk have yet to get back to me with a solution!
Ananth

Thanks - Cubs parade is today, and I think about 8 million people will be on hand.  It was a really really good game - and good series.  I don't watch baseball anymore - but watched the entire post-season for Cubs this year.
 
I will do some digging around and see if I can come up with some additional stuff related to your issues.
 
It really seems to me to be some sort of maintenance issue between whatever current maintenance level your computer is running at, where some processing in Platinum is expecting some certain maintenance level for the computer, and it dying because it doesn't know what to do for some reason.
 
Sooo - after MUCH coffee and a hot breakfast - I will see if I can help you figure this out.  It is certainly something unique with your system, as if it were more widely spread (more folks having the issue), there would be lots of people posting about the problem being there on THEIR computers too.
 
Hang in there, 
 
Bob Bone
 

Bob, thanks, appreciate your assistance.  You are my only lifeline now!
 
Maintenance: well I downloaded this utility called 'System Mechanic' from iolo.  Seems to have done something - I can't really tell what, but it does report my system is GOOD as of now.  When I did run it the first time, there were some 1,000 odd issues, many not important, but a few were important - so I did a fix it for all.
 
I stayed away from the Sonar Platinum short cut on my desktop - but I will give it a go now that this utility says all is well!  Keeping my fingers crossed!
 
Thanks again!